Chapter 2
Chapter Two
It’s still there when I wake up the next morning.
I lie in bed, listening to Alex in the bathroom, the tap running, the soft thud of the cabinet door. Routine morning sounds. Safe sounds. But my mind isn’t in this room. It’s on my phone, and on the little notification I didn’t open, didn’t accept, didn’t delete.
Ross Mercer wants to be friends.
I sit up and push my hair out of my face.
The bedroom is grey with early light, the curtains not meeting in the middle.
Olivia’s alarm is going off down the hall – that tinny, awful song she’s chosen as her ringtone, playing on a loop because she sleeps through the first four rounds every single morning.
I should go and bang on her door. I should get up, put the kettle on, start the packed lunch, find her PE kit, do all the things I always do.
But I sit with my hands in my lap and think about a name I haven’t seen in twenty years, glowing on a screen in the dark.
I didn’t accept it. That’s the important thing.
I told myself last night that I’d sleep on it, and sleeping on it would make the whole thing shrink back to what it actually is – nothing.
An old school friend, a social media request, something that happens to everyone.
People reconnect. People look up the names they used to know. It doesn’t mean anything.
So why is my pulse doing something odd in my throat?
Alex comes out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist, already half-dressed in his head, already thinking about work. He nods at me like I’m someone he’s passing in a corridor and opens the wardrobe.
‘Olivia’s alarm,’ I say.
‘I can hear it.’
‘Are you going to—?’
‘I’ve got to be in early,’ he says. ‘Can you sort her out?’
I can always sort her out. That’s my job, apparently. Sorting out is what I do, while Alex puts on a clean shirt and drives to an office where people call him Mr Stiller and bring him coffee and listen when he talks.
I push the duvet off and go to wake Olivia.
She’s face down in her pillow, one arm dangling off the side of the bed, her phone blaring three inches from her ear. I turn it off and sit on the edge of the mattress.
‘Liv. Come on.’
She groans.
‘School. Up. Now.’
‘Five minutes.’
‘Your alarm has been going off for longer than five minutes.’
She rolls over and squints at me with one eye, her hair a disaster, her face creased with sleep.
She looks so young when she’s like this.
Younger than thirteen, younger than the stroppy, careful version of herself she puts on downstairs.
I smooth her hair back, and she lets me, just for a second, before she bats my hand away and sits up.
‘I’m up,’ she says. ‘Stop hovering.’
I go downstairs and make breakfast. Toast for Olivia, cereal she won’t eat, juice she’ll complain about.
Coffee for me, strong, no sugar, the mug with the chipped handle I keep meaning to throw away but never do.
I stand at the kitchen worktop and drink it while the toast pops and the house fills with the sounds of Alex’s shoes on the stairs, Olivia’s door banging, the shower starting up.
My phone is still upstairs. Face down. Screen dark.
I tell myself I’m not thinking about it and carry on making the packed lunch.
Alex appears in the kitchen in his work suit, knotting his tie with one hand, checking his watch with the other. He takes a banana from the fruit bowl and leans against the worktop.
‘Olivia’s got the dentist this afternoon,’ I say. ‘Half three.’
He frowns. ‘Today?’
‘I told you last week. It’s been in the calendar for a month.’
‘I can’t do half three,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a meeting that’ll run till five at least. Can you take her?’
I stare at him. ‘I’ve got a deadline. I told you that as well.’
‘Can you move it?’
‘Can you move your meeting?’
He gives me that look – patient, tired, slightly above it all – and I hate it.
I hate how reasonable he makes himself sound, how the logistics always fall on me, how every conversation about who does what ends with me doing it because Alex’s work is real work with a salary and mine is just something I fit in around the edges of everyone else’s life.
‘Kim, I really can’t,’ he says. ‘It’s the Goldberg case. I’ve got three people flying in from London.’
‘Fine.’
‘Don’t say fine like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like I’ve done something wrong. I’m not trying to—’
‘I said fine, Alex. I’ll take her.’
He opens his mouth, thinks better of it, and picks up his briefcase. He kisses the top of my head on his way past, a gesture so automatic it barely registers as affection, and I hear the front door close behind him.
I stand in the kitchen with my coffee going cold, my chest tight, and a dull, heavy resentment settling somewhere behind my ribs.
He didn’t do anything wrong. That’s what makes it worse.
He didn’t shout, didn’t refuse, didn’t say my work doesn’t matter.
He just made it obvious, again, without saying the actual words, that when something needs doing, it’s my name on the rota, every time, no questions asked.
I’m the one who rearranges. I’m the one who shifts her deadlines and cancels her plans and sits in the waiting room with a magazine from 2019 while Olivia gets her teeth checked, because Alex has a meeting and three people flying in from London and a career that apparently can’t bend.
I rinse my mug and leave it in the sink.
Upstairs, I pick up my phone. The screen lights up, and there it is – the little red dot, the notification, the name.
Ross Mercer.
I put it down again and go to my desk. I’ve got a cover to finish for a small press in Edinburgh – a psychological thriller, dark background, serif font, a woman’s silhouette – and I need to have the final version across by Friday.
I open my laptop, load the file, adjust the kerning on the title, and spend twenty minutes staring at a screen without seeing it.
All I can see is his name.
I email the client to say the file will be a day late and close the laptop. Then I shower, get dressed, drive Olivia to school with the radio filling the silence between us, and come home to an empty house.
The day crawls by. I sit in the dentist’s waiting room with Olivia beside me, her legs crossed, her phone in her hand, her thumb scrolling through something I can’t see.
The room smells of antiseptic, and the receptionist is on the phone using a tone so bright it makes my teeth ache.
There’s a fish tank in the corner with two sad-looking fish circling the same plastic castle, and a stack of leaflets about gum disease fanned out on the coffee table like a threat.
‘How long do you think it’ll take?’ Olivia asks without looking up.
‘Twenty minutes. Maybe less.’
‘Can we get McDonald’s after?’
‘We’ll see.’
She goes back to her phone. I sit with my bag on the floor between my feet, and I feel it – that taken-for-granted feeling that’s been building all day.
Alex in the kitchen, tying his tie, not even considering that he could be the one sitting here.
Me, rearranging again. Me, always the one who bends.
I take out my phone.
I don’t mean to open the app. I’m just going to check my emails, or look at the news, or do any of the mindless things you do when you’re sitting in a plastic chair waiting for your daughter’s name to be called. But my thumb finds the icon, the screen loads, and there it is, right at the top.
Ross Mercer has sent you a friend request.
His profile picture is small, but I can make out his face.
Older, obviously – we’re all older – but still him.
Dark hair, greying a bit at the sides. A half-smile that isn’t quite a smile, more like he’s been caught mid-thought.
He’s outdoors somewhere, his coat collar turned up, trees behind him.
He looks well. He looks like someone I used to know so completely that the shape of his face was more familiar than my own.
My stomach lurches, and I don’t know if it’s from excitement or fear.
I sit there with my thumb hovering over the screen, and I think about Alex.
About the kitchen this morning, the kiss on the top of my head, the Goldberg case, the meeting that couldn’t move.
I think about how I’ve been sitting in waiting rooms and rearranging deadlines and sorting things out for years, and nobody once has asked me if I’m all right with that.
I think about the fact that I’m thirty-seven and I can’t remember the last time I felt like someone actually saw me, not as a wife or a mother or a person who handles things, but as me. Kim.
And I think about Ross Mercer, who disappeared when I was seventeen and took something with him that I’ve never got back.
‘Olivia Stiller?’ the receptionist calls.
Olivia stands, tucks her phone into her pocket, and walks towards the corridor without looking back. I watch her go. The door swings shut behind her.
I’m alone in the waiting room.
I press accept.
It takes less than a second. A tap of my thumb, a brief loading circle, and then his name slides from the request list into my friends list as if it belongs there, as if it’s always been there. Ross Mercer. Connected.
My heart is hammering. Actually hammering, like I’ve done something dangerous, like I’ve opened a door I can’t close.
I lock the screen and put the phone face down on my knee and press my hands together, and the antiseptic smell of the room feels suddenly too sharp and too close.
One of the fish bumps its nose against the glass, turns, and swims the same loop again.
It’s just a friend request. People accept them every day. Old classmates, university friends, people from jobs you left ten years ago. It means nothing. It doesn’t have to lead anywhere. It doesn’t have to mean anything at all.
So why do I feel like I’ve just told a lie?
I sit very still and wait for Olivia to come back.
I try to make the feeling go away, but it won’t.
It sits on my chest like a hand pressing down – warm and heavy and wrong.
I think about Alex’s face if he saw the notification.
I think about what I’d say. Oh, just someone from school.
Nobody important. And I know, even as I rehearse the words, that they wouldn’t be true.
The door opens. Olivia comes out with a sticker on her jumper and the bored expression of a teenager who has survived something deeply beneath her.
‘All fine,’ she says. ‘Can we get McDonald’s now?’
‘Come on, then.’
I pick up my bag and my phone and follow her out into the car park. When the fresh air hits my face and I feel my cheeks blister, I know it’s not the cold.